Chinese police have freed 3,455 children and 7,365 women in nearly nine months since a campaign against human trafficking was launched in early April last year, an official from the Ministry of Public Security said Friday.

The police broke up 1,684 criminal gangs in the process as of Dec. 28, said Huang Zuyue, a deputy director of the ministry's criminal investigation bureau, in a statement on the ministry's official website.

He said so far 19 out of 20 suspects on the ministry's most-wanted list of serious abduction crimes had been arrested.

As a move to intensify the fight against abduction, once a missing child case was reported, the ministry would ask police to immediately search for the missing person, investigate the criminal scene, file evidence for further investigation, and collect blood samples for the database, he said.

A special group should be set up to handle each child abduction case, and the group would not be dismissed until the case was cracked, he said.

Police would also speed up the building of a DNA database to combat child trafficking, Huang noted.

The database would include DNA from the parents of abducted children and DNA from the children who were suspected of having been abducted or vagrant children whose history was unclear, he said.